Early Warning

His thoughts returned to the Cathars. He wished he remembered what they’d called themselves; perhaps it was “Parfaits,” or “Perfected Ones”? In years of eyeballing religion from a greater or lesser distance, which was something you had to do if you read twenty thousand books about the history and culture of Europe, he had never encountered one that drew him at all, but there was something about the Cathars’ rejection of earthly filth, their revulsion at the wealth and corruption of the Church, their belief in the equality of the sexes, and their disparagement of the importance of the Crucifixion that appealed to him. He had never been able to imagine himself as a Mercian or a West Saxon — he’d loved them for their strangeness — but he could imagine himself as a chaste vegetarian who considered the God of the Old Testament a satanic usurper who in six days created a Hell on Earth. The evidence of that was everywhere.

—

JOE DIDN’T GO to church during harvest, but Lois, of course, did. She had incorporated whatever Pastor Campbell wanted into her schedule as smoothly as possible, and Pastor Campbell relied on Lois for everything. Minnie did not agree with Joe that Pastor Campbell was harmless — he had gotten into a brouhaha with the minister at the Lutheran church — Kellogg, his name was — as a result of passing out leaflets outside Kellogg’s church and swiping twenty of his members, his justification being that the end was at hand and Kellogg was wasting valuable minutes preaching about the church parking lot and the used-clothing drive. Campbell never asked for money, and he never talked about this world — he talked about the Rapture, which Joe had thought, at first, was a hymn-singing group. It took him a while to realize that the Rapture was more about punishment than reward, but he still saw it as a figure of speech. Only in the last few months had Minnie impressed upon Joe that neither Pastor Campbell nor Lois was kidding — they expected their very bodies to be swept upward, no matter what they were doing, and they did not like any jokes about it. Joe kept his mouth shut, except to complain about the price of corn and beans; at any rate, he was too tired to think about it.

However, when he did get to church after three weeks, the first thing he heard, even before everyone sat down and Pastor Campbell came in, was about Marsh Whitehead’s killing himself. That reminded him so totally of his uncle Rolf that Lois had to tell him three times that Marsh had shot himself. Shot himself in the head with his.22, right in the mouth. Hanging had nothing to do with it. Joe came to his senses.

Marsh Whitehead was a good farmer. They knew each other well enough to touch their caps on the street, to compare seed prices at the feed store and to smile indulgently if Sarah Whitehead and Lois happened to get into a conversation about sin. They knew each other well enough so that Joe might be asked to be a coffin bearer — you needed eight of those, and Marsh didn’t have any sons. But they did not know each other well enough for Joe to ask probing questions about debtor interest, about that quarter-section Marsh had snapped up the previous year. The best he could do was keep his ears open.